Tpandemic took a toll on countless businesses. Doors were shut, lights turned off, futures lost. The outlook was bleak, to say the least. But there are entrepreneurs who won’t be held back. And business people who find a way, a workaround, a life preserver amid the floodwaters.
For those in various aspects of the food business the lockdown and other factors of the virus called their operations to a screeching halt. Regional wholesalers to restaurants and smaller stores or on a direct basis to larger stores found themselves without customers. For restaurants it meant no diners, which meant zero revenue, zero everything. If take-out had not been on the agenda, or had not been feasible, this was a death sentence.
This meant no revenue, loss of operations, the need to lay off or furlough the staff. To some that was simply unacceptable.
Two examples of canny thinking and entrepreneurial spirit in the face of this urgent predicament took place in the New York City neighborhood Hudson Heights. The Pandering Pig, a small French/California Sonoma fusion restaurant, faced this crisis head on. Dutch Baby Bakery, wholesaler to restaurants and specialty stores, also had to deal with this death knell to its business.
Both businesses came up with solutions.
Pandering Pig let the immediate area know it would offer “food boxes” via Facebook and word of mouth. The neighborhood has numerous groups on Facebook, almost all of which posted about this. The prices were a little better than if dining in the restaurant. It was pickup at the restaurant or delivery for an additional $5. They offered a limited number of menu items. The menu was listed on the website, changing each week. It was order and pay by Wednesday, for pickup or delivery on the following Monday. Some Wednesdays the pickings were slim, as most of the dishes were already ordered. This carried them through the lockdown and kept the business going. The line outside the restaurant for pickup was evidence of the success of this strategy.
Dutch Baby Bakery had a thriving wholesale business delivering cakes, loaves of all types of bread, specialty items, and a variety of ethnic pastries to restaurants and specialty food shops. In addition to that, Dutch Baby had (still has) a relationship with an Ethiopian coffee shop with a few locations in upper Manhattan and Westchester. Some years back when a pop-up store had a few months run around the corner from one of the coffee shop locations, Dutch Baby had a weekends-only booth, selling cakes, pies, breads, and cookies. Week after week Dutch Baby sold out. The pop-up store had local crafts artists, textiles, woodwork, jewelry, personal care. Dutch Baby was the only food merchant in the store.
It had been well more than a few years since that pop-up store when the pandemic hit. Dutch Baby had no retail customers, nor even a venue then, as the coffee shops had shut with the lockdown. Overnight, the wholesale business evaporated. The pop-up store experiment had been a big hit. The coffee shop service, done by Dutch Baby as a favor to their friends who owned the shops, was successful. They knew there was something there, they just had to figure out what it was.